The Exorcist III

 

The Exorcist III

Dir. William Peter Blatty

Written by William Peter Blatty

Starring George C. Scott, Jason Miller, Brad Dourif

 

THE EXORCIST was an enormous, unqualified success when it premiered in late 1973. A critical and popular darling, it grossed $441 million worldwide on a modest $12 million budget, became a cultural phenomenon, was the first horror film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and remains a high-water mark for 70's genre cinema, and cinema at large. So of course the two people the studio sought out to direct the sequels were the only two people who were on record hating the original. I mean, that just makes sound creative and financial sense, frankly it would have been irresponsible to do anything else.

The first of those was John Boorman, who perpetrated THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) on the world, and for that unforgivable act is forever damned. William Friedkin (who directed THE EXORCIST but was not initially interested in coming back for a sequel) was not coy about his feelings regarding that little misstep: “It's just a stupid mess made by a dumb guy – John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless, but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture." And Boorman probably didn’t feel any kinder to Friedkin’s movie: he had turned down the opportunity to direct THE EXORCIST, which he found "rather repulsive" and almost turned down the sequel too, saying, “‘I don't want to make a film about torturing a child’, which is how I saw the original film" before ultimately taking the job in order to create "a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially." So yes, obviously you simply must hire the guy who hated the original and wanted the sequel to be a direct repudiation of one of the most popular and iconic movies of all time. It went about as well as you might expect. No wait, scratch that, I actually don’t think it would even be possible to expect anything to go as badly as it did. Humans, even the most pessimistic among us, simply don’t have the imaginative capacity to conceive of something as profoundly, insanely misguided as THE EXORCIST II until it arrives in front of us.

Suffice to say, with EXORCIST II a complete and unmitigated critical, popular, and commercial disaster, nobody was begging Boorman to come back again. So the studio cast about for the second-biggest EXORCIST hater they could locate, and found William Peter Blatty. Blatty, having written the bestselling novel that served as the basis for the original film, and having written the script and produced the film himself (with a great deal of creative input, including about casting), was about as deeply involved as anyone in the making of THE EXORCIST, and consequently wasn't entirely bearish on the finished film. But he nevertheless felt dissatisfied with the final result, especially after Friedkin trimmed 20 minutes for the final (122 minute) cut at the behest of the studio, after which, according to Friedkin, “Bill [Blatty] was vitriolic. He was harsh. He would denounce the picture." But not long after EXORCIST II, everyone’s temper seemed to have mellowed a bit, and Friedkin and Blatty were actively working on a sequel.

I’m honestly a little unclear on when exactly this began. Blatty (who, I gather from various interviews I’ve read for this review, has a tendency to tell different stories at different times) claims in this interview that “It took me that long to think of a follow up to the original story. That's why I didn't do [Exorcist II],” which means that at least as late as 1977, he hadn’t planned on writing a sequel at all. By the late 70’s, he was presumably working on his directorial debut, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (which was based on his 1966 novel with the magnificent title of Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) which premiered in 1980. So I suspect it wouldn’t be until the early 80’s that he began working in earnest on an EXORCIST follow-up, first pitching the idea to Friedkin as a film, and then, after the project languished for awhile in Development Hell, publishing it as the novel Legion in 1983. But sources differ on the exact timing of all this; In this interview Blatty says that he considers The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and Legion to be a trilogy of sorts – and the fact that he places them in that order (despite The Ninth Configuration being based on a novel that precedes all of them) suggests to me that he’s referring to the film version rather than the book, and that therefor Legion came into being sometimes after 1980. On the other hand, this Bloodydisgusting article claims that Blatty “originally wrote the screenplay for a film that was called Legion right after the release of THE EXORCIST,” but that Friedkin passed and the job went to Boorman. This strikes me as unlikely – if the studio already had a finished script, or even a story outline, from the original author, why would they hire some other guy (first playwright William Goodhart, then Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg) to write a whole new concept from scratch? This article from TheSpool claims that Blatty’s pitch to Friedkin happened “at the same time” that EXORCIST II was being loathed at the box office but still making enough of a profit that future sequels seemed feasible.

So I don’t know. But at any rate, all sources seem to agree that sometime after the original EXORCIST, and probably after the misery of EXORCIST II, Blatty wrote a script for an EXORCIST follow-up called LEGION, and that he took it first to Friedkin, who was initially enthusiastic about the concept but later left the project over creative differences. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Blatty eventually turned his screenplay into a novel, which he published as Legion in 1983, and which did well enough to get Hollywood interested in an adaptation. Tantalizingly, most sources also mention one further detail: that after re-adapting his novel into a screenplay, Blatty approached John Carpenter to direct, and that Carpenter was interested before he eventually bowed out after concluding that Blatty was going to be a complete control freak about this and should really just direct it himself. Knowing that John Carpenter almost directed an EXORCIST sequel and then did MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992) instead might incline one to dwell on what we missed out on.* But actually Blatty, directing for the second and final time (a decade after THE NINTH CONFIGURATION) proves himself a surprisingly strong director, giving it a distinct tone and some impressively well-staged sequences. Like Clive Barker directing HELLRAISER, it just seems like Blatty intuitively understood --right off the bat-- what he wanted and how to bring his distinct literary voice to the big screen.

The distinct voice is what jumps out first. The movie is moody and uneasy, but flecked with little notes of offbeat comedy. There's an early sequence featuring the supernatural desecration of a church which mirrors a similar sequence in THE EXORCIST, except this time we get a series of comic "reaction shots" of a statue of Jesus, who changes his expression to shock and displeasure. It is at this point that one might recall that Blatty began his screenwriting career as writer of farce (he co-wrote A SHOT IN THE DARK, among other comedies, often for Blake Edwards). But there's nothing else quite so silly as that in the film; mostly, the streak of comedy manifests itself in the idiosyncratic protagonist Lt. Kinderman (played by a very game George C. Scott, taking over the role from THE EXORCIST's much more sedate Lee J. Cobb, who had died in 1976**). Kinderman is a curious and intriguing character. I don't know if I've ever seen another quite like him. He's a hard-boiled cop, but has a tendency to fly off the handle and rant about unexpected topics. In what is certainly the best scene in the film, and perhaps any scene in any film, Scott, at his absolute George C. Scottiest, delivers an impassioned monologue about a carp that's currently living in his bathtub on the way to a dinner plate. He seems downright unhinged, but Scott also has a merry twinkle in his eye as if he's reveling in the discomfort he's eliciting. The net result is that we're never quite sure how much of his apparent instability is genuine and how much is a private comedy show for a very old fart who enjoys causing a scene.

Nevertheless, while Blatty is obviously doing something tonally different from Friedkin’s icy, bleak take on the original, it is still a horror film, and in many ways a damn good one. It follows Kinderman (a fairly minor character in the original movie), who, since the days of the Regan MacNeil's exorcism, has gotten involved with the case of a serial killer called “The Gemini”*** (Brad Dourif, CHILD’S PLAY) and is troubled immensely when victims demonstrating his exact MO begin to reappear. Bad enough that the killer’s back, after all, but even worse because the killer is supposed to be dead, and the crime scenes all have different fingerprints on them, despite the lockstep similarity in method. And even worse than that when it starts to become clear that the victims all have a (pretty tangential) link to The Regan MacNeil case. Plus, there’s a guy in the mental institution at the hospital who happens to look exactly like the long-deceased Father Karras (Jason Miller, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION). You know, this actually seems like the kind of situation which would be better suited for an THE EXORCIST than a hard-boiled cop. Fortunately, Kinderman, though not exactly a religiously religious man, is spiritually open-minded enough that he doesn’t shrink from more exotic explanations for these crimes, and before long he’s interviewing the mystery man known as “Patient X” (in the novel, the much cheerier “Tommy Sunshine”!) and probably wondering how in the hell you prosecute a case where (SPOILERS) the killers are possessed by a guy who’s possessed by a serial killer who’s possessed by a demon. Kinda a possession turducken situation. I guess, like, start with a conspiracy charge and go from there?

Scott’s willingness to be constantly one second away from some sort of furious freak-out fits the material well: as you might have deduced from the previous paragraph, it’s slightly exaggerated, sometimes to the point of comedy (as with a heavenly dream where Scott sees an Angelic Fabio and Patrick Ewing [!]), sometimes to the point of disturbing grotesqueness (as with an uncomfortably spot-on Spider-Man impression from a cackling old lady). And the other actors are on board with the off-kilter plot and tone Blatty seems to be shooting for. You’ll be glad to know that Brad Dourif is not about to be out-freakout’d by George C. Scott, and that Jason Miller (who sat out EXORCIST II to the point that they do a soft retcon to remove him from the flashback exorcism scenes!) is a welcome presence and does a lot to tie this third sequel to the original EXORCIST by the mere fact of his being there (the links are otherwise pretty tangential). It all works pretty well, maintaining a distinct tone, telling an odd but comprehensible story, spicing things up with the occasional bit of horror whammy.

It is, in fact, exactly those moments of horror whammy which elevate this from “surprising not shitty considering the circumstances” to “wait, this is actually great, maybe?” Though Blatty cannot hope to recapture the soul-deep horror crucible of the original EXORCIST, he manages to stage a handful of truly exceptional horror beats which ensure that there’s some genuine menace lurking even through the most offbeat scenes here. I do not consider it hyperbole to suggest that the famous late-night nurse sequence (you know the one I mean) is up there with the absolute best-executed coil-and-release shock scares in all horror, and although nothing else in the movie comes close to that, having even one scene that delivers such a wallop makes for a movie that can't be lightly dismissed. It does stumble slightly when it finally arrives at the inevitable exorcism finale, which can't help but invite unflattering comparisons to the greatest-of-all-time original. But even here it's far from an embarrassment. The climax doesn't quite come together, but it's still a ferocious and estimable example of the form.

Which is especially impressive, considering it was not the original ending, and was forced on Blatty at the last minute by the studio, after the movie had already been shot. Legion the novel, as well as the original script, had no final exorcism scene, and no Exorcist character. And in fact, if Blatty had his way, it wouldn’t have been titled THE EXORCIST III; he still considered LEGION to be the correct title. But a franchise is a franchise, and despite the well-poisoning that EXORCIST II had done, the suits insisted on the title, and once that happened (according to Blatty) the secretary of producer James Robinson convinced him that they couldn’t have an EXORCIST movie which contained no exorcism. Which is, you know, not an entirely absurd point, but probably something you want to work out at a point before the film has been completely shot. This being Hollywood, of course, that’s exactly when the suits intervened and demanded a new ending, as well as more narrative links to the original EXORCIST. Blatty balked, stalled, but ultimately decided that if he didn’t do it himself, they’d just fire him and hire some other hack to do their dirty work, so he dutifully went back and shot new material which radically altered the film to fit a new studio-mandated exorcism-delivering climax.

Some of that material includes a not-especially-well-integrated subplot about a character named “Father Morning” (Nicol Williamson, who had previously worked with John Boorman, of all people, on EXCALIBUR), a priest who never meets Lt. Kinderman or any of the other characters until the climax, but who we occasionally observe sitting around silently, obviously waiting for his chance to do some hardcore exorcizing. Not ideal from a storytelling perspective, but fortunately the movie is hazy and strange enough that these scenes don’t feel disastrously out of place; we’ve trusted Blatty for a lot of weird stuff throughout the movie, and we trust that this seemingly unrelated character is important in some way, which he indeed turns out to be (in fact, he makes for a respectable red herring while we wait, a character strange and nebulous enough to make a suitable alternative suspect to “Patient X”). Against all odds, the new material manages to sit alongside the original storyline –if not neatly—at least comfortably.

But that is nothing compared to the biggest change imposed by the studio: in an effort to further link this movie to THE EXORCIST, they demanded Blatty bring Jason Miller back as Father Karras. Yes! Amazingly, Miller was not going to be in the movie at all until the last-minute reshoots, despite the fact that Brad Dourif is supposed to be playing a guy who looks just like and may be some kind of reincarnation or resurrection of Damien Karras. Why did Blatty not just approach Miller from the beginning? I can find no official first-hand explanation, although I read that in the DVD commentary Dourif explains that Miller’s alcoholism (of which I can also find no other documented evidence) had left him unable to do the kind of wordy monologuing that Blatty had in mind. At any rate, Dourif had already finished his performance by the time Miller came on board, and rather than entirely replace him, Blatty had the insane/brilliant idea of keeping both performances. So sometimes we see Miller, sometimes we see Dourif – which makes sense in a possession movie! In fact, it’s sort of maybe really great; Miller makes no effort whatsoever to mimic Dourif’s go-for-broke mega-acting, and it creates a real live-wire, multi-layer explosiveness to the character. Sometimes we see Miller, sitting placidly with just a shadow of a malicious smirk on his face, and then in a blink of an eye we’ll switch to a bug-eyed, shrieking and spitting Dourif, and then back, never quite sure which part of this, if any, is “real.” And with apologies to Blatty, the suits were right that having Miller back links the thing much more robustly to the original EXORCIST, which was perhaps not strictly necessary, but it helps lend this dubious third sequel some credibility and tactile connection to its forbearer. A good example of how maybe the suits were not entirely wrong, or if they were entirely wrong at least Blatty was nimble enough to make their absurd demands nestle comfortably into his world, if not quite his vision.

I’d obviously be interested in seeing Blatty’s original cut, and now it’s possible –there’s a semi-complete “director’s cut” on the 2016 Shout! Factory Blu-ray release (albeit with much of the footage taken from low-quality sources, and some never recovered). But frankly I’m pretty enamored with the theatrical version already. Even the studio-mandated exorcism scene is packed full of shocking imagery and provocative theology, and I think I’d miss it if it was gone altogether. The movie feels a little overcooked in places, but between Scott's eccentric and frisky performance, the offbeat tone, and some solid and occasionally bravura horror beats, it also feels dense and surprising and rewarding. All in all, a startlingly strong showing which I feel has been unfairly pilloried with all the other misbegotten EXORCIST sequels. Not bad for a screenwriter and novelist making only his second (and, sadly, final!) film. And considering the dismal reputation and equally tormented production of every other EXORCIST sequel, I’d say it’s damn close to a miracle that this came out so well. Blatty claimed that EXORCIST III is about the “problem of evil” – ie, why a kind, loving, omnipotent god permits evil to exist. I’m not sure the movie exactly answers that question, but I can relate – I have similar questions about the proliferation of miserable franchise sequels. Every once in awhile, though, good does triumph over evil, and a genuinely good horror sequel sneaks its way past all the perils that beset such projects and ends up on-screen. I’m not sure that proves the existence of a kind, loving God, but it sure doesn’t hurt the case.

Appendix A: Cameos from people you probably do not expect to be in THE EXORCIST III, ranked in ascending order of improbability:

1.      Pre-fame Kevin Corrigan

2.      Pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson (one line, dubbed by someone else)

3.      “young” Larry King

4.      NBA great Patrick Ewing

5.      Fabio

6.      Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Appendix B: Dialogue used in metal songs: I gather that some Gemini Killer dialogue is used as the introduction to the Children of Bodom songs "Follow the Reaper" and "Taste of My Scythe". The Cryptopsy song "Crown of Horns" also “employs a roar and dialogue heard in Cell 11.” So that’s legit.



* But never fear, David Gordon Green, who got to be the New John Carpenter with his HALLOWEEN sequel trilogy, is also signed to direct an EXORCIST sequel trilogy, so in a way it'll be a chance to see what a Carpenter EXORCIST would have been like, except nothing like that.

 

** It would be the first of two times that Scott would take over a role originated by Cobb: the second would be in 1997, when he played Juror #3 in a remake of TWELVE ANGRY MEN (Cobb played the role in the 1957 version) directed by, of all people, William Friedkin.

 

*** The “Zodiac killer” made reference to THE EXORCIST in a letter, which he called “the best saterical comidy [sic] that I have ever seen.” Since Blatty leaned a little heavier on comedy in his subsequent horror movies, I’m going to go ahead and assume that naming his fictional serial killer “The Gemini” is an affectionate tribute to the guy who gave him the idea. Later, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would express his own appreciation for THE EXORCIST III. From Wikipedia: “The film became a focal point of the trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Detectives testified that Dahmer claimed to identify with the Gemini Killer and would play the film for some of his victims before killing them. Dahmer's final attempted victim, Tracy Edwards, testified that Dahmer would rock back and forth while chanting at various times and that he especially enjoyed a sequence with a possessed Karras. Dahmer went so far as to purchase yellow contact lenses to more resemble Miller, as well as to emulate another film character he admired, Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi.” Proving that above all other things, serial killers are giant fucking dorks.